Pages

Friday, January 11, 2013

So You Want to Be in Pictures? -- or -- The Exclamation Point (Part 2)

"Pictures? Does this mean that yours truly, only a week away from flying to Thailand
for gender confirmation surgery, is about to give us a review
of holiday season movies?"

Well,
not quite, although I did like Argo
and
Anna
Karenina
but would suggest steering clear of The Hobbit unless you enjoy
seeing the fantasy of your mind’s eye blown out of proportion on a
3D screen.

Going
to the movies has been a fun way to spend the quiet days of the
holiday season. The U.S. Embassy in Bucharest followed the Romanian
holidays, giving us all but Thursday and Friday of Christmas week as
days off. The same was true of New Year’s week. It felt as though
we had been given a two week vacation. Much of the time I kept my
eye on the calendar, counting down the days until OD and I fly to
Thailand on January 19.

Rupert Minds the Bicycles

The
holiday was not entirely a movie-going experience. On New Year’s
Eve, Rupert took me on a bicycle excursion to a part of Bucharest I
would never have discovered on my own. After making our way down icy
dirt roads between abandoned factories in a wasteland landscape, we
came to a ruined eighteenth century cathedral that had been burned by
the Ottomans but that continued to stand through the centuries. With
walls that look more than five feet thick, it’s no wonder that the
structure withstood wars and Communism. Today there is a steel fence
around it to protect it from the curious, but Rupert says there was
not even that when he first came upon the cathedral many months ago. It was somehow a comfort on New Year’s Eve to stand before a
monument that had withstood the test of time.

New
Year’s Eve was a repeat of my Thanksgiving open house. Guests
began arriving at 9pm, numbering 25 or more in the end. The stereo
volume went up and the bottles were opened. I set up the telescope
outdoors for anyone who wanted to look at the Moon or Jupiter. At
midnight we all went outside to pop the champagne corks and hug each
other as the Bucharest sky burst forth in a blaze of fireworks. What
a contrast it was to my lonely New Year’s Eve of two years ago when
I stood at the threshold of full transition. (See The Education of a Transgender Rip Van Winkle.) Only at 4am
did the party start to ebb, a few friends staying to watch movies. I
left them on the couch sometime after 5am. When I woke up hours
later, I was delighted to see that those who had stayed had already
done much to clear up the evidence of an all-night party.

Movies
and pictures were a part of my holidays in another way. Just before
Christmas I received a DVD that took me by surprise. I had nearly
forgotten that in 2007 I had been discovered
by a small film crew that wanted to make a documentary based on the
research that Alina Eremeeva and I had done on the 1936-37 purge of
astronomers in the Soviet Union. (See My Great Purge.) No, it wasn’t National Geographic or the Museum of Natural History
that had come knocking at our door. The group that had discovered us
came from an institution I had never heard of before, the Museum of
Jurassic Technology in California. I was somewhat nervous as I put
the DVD in the player, wondering what a movie produced by a museum
specializing in Jurassic
technology might
look like. Indeed, the hour-long documentary is stylized, but
factually it follows Alina’s and my published works closely. The filmmakers had traveled widely, filming on-site at Pulkovo
Observatory, in St. Petersburg, and in Uzbekistan. Once I saw that
the facts had been preserved, I sat back and began to enjoy the
stylized and somber presentation that includes poetry appropriate to
the tragedy that befell Soviet astronomy in the 1930s. (The film is
called The
Great Soviet Eclipse. You
can find a short on-line excerpt here.)

Alina’s
and my research was the star
of
this documentary, but I also now find myself at the center of a film
on transgender issues that the young Bucharest filmmaker Alexandra
Carastoian is making. Alexandra is associated with the Romanian LGBT
rights organization ACCEPT, and she has made a number of short films
for ACCEPT. She first approached me about her idea for a film over a
year ago, but it took six months before my involvement was approved
through the appropriate channels both at our Embassy and in
Washington. Since then Alexandra has come periodically to film an
interview with me as well as some candid day-to-day scenes from my
life. Her latest film session was last Saturday, and it turned into
a mini-party as we began with breakfast, moved to filming, and then
continued with dinner. OD had come from Moldova and also became
a part of the film.

Alexandra
says her favorite part of making a film comes in the cutting room as
she puts it all together. I have full trust in Alexandra who by now
has also become a good friend, but I am sure that it will be with
some nervousness that I view the finished product for the first time. It was one thing to see a DVD based on my research. What will it be
like to see a film in which it is not my research but the living me who
is on the screen?

Now
we come to the movie
that
is my life. I’m sure a few readers have struggled through the
paragraphs above, wondering when I would finally get to what has been
happening day-to-day as the Thailand clock counts down.

The
nuts and bolts are that all monies have been transferred to the
Phuket International Hospital. OD spent several days with me
last week in order to go to the Thai Embassy to apply for her visa. There is no embassy in Chisinau, the Moldovan capital, so anyone from
Moldova who wishes to go to Thailand must come to Bucharest for a
visa. Our surgeon, Dr. Sanguan Kunaporn, has received and approved
the letters that OD’s and my counselors wrote as justification
for our surgeries.

Over
a week ago, as required by Dr. Kunaporn, I ceased taking my daily
dosage of estradiol as well as aspirin and vitamin supplements. Dr.
Kunaporn allows his patients to continue on anti-androgen medication
right up until surgery, so at least I am not experiencing any sudden
testosterone explosion. I do, however, feel the decrease in estrogen
level. I feel more on edge, quicker to react to anything that is not
going according to plan. Insomnia of the wake-in-the-middle-of-the-night variety has returned, encouraged by the
anti-androgen-induced bathroom trips together with my increased
excitement as the imminence of my journey to Thailand becomes ever
more palpable.

What
are my greatest worries today? At the top of my list is getting
sick. Coming down with a cold or flu over the coming week would be
the greatest catastrophe I can think of. Fortunately, I was dragged
down for days by a severe cold in the first half of December, and I
hope that has given me some immunity that will last me through the
week to come.

Almost
there. The journey to Thailand may just be an exclamation point in
this life journey, but it is the answer to my childhood dream and
prayer. In the evenings I am rediscovering old episodes of the
Twilight
Zone that
I first saw as a child in the 1960s, remembering the promise of a
mysterious magic that might transform my life before I woke the next
morning. That morning finally comes in little over a week. It is
not the Twilight
Zone
with Rod Serling standing off camera. Instead, it is the reality of
a life transformed through hard work, suffering experienced and suffering caused, and the love of
friends and family, a drama that Rod Serling himself could not have
conceived of.

* * * * * * * *

The link below is to Alexandra Carastoian's short film Vreau sa stiu cum e that she made for Pride Month 2012.